searching

On with the job search. My temp position has ended, both blessing and curse. Really it's more of a curse but with a bright side. The bright side is of course that the people I worked for/with were the sort who can't get the hell out of their own way. K-cop and her buddy, Queen B (with all that B stands for) were chronic thorns in my side. They were each causes and embodiments of much that was wrong culturally with that office, however I can't say the "big boss lady" didn't hold some responsibility in the mess that was the office climate and overall philosophy of "let's just assume everything will go according to plan". I don't get that mentality. It doesn't fit with my own experiences in any domain and I can't imagine running an office like that. Sure, sometimes you can't cover all the bases. It might be impractical or impossible. Time constraints, personnel allocation, and budget may conspire against preparing for possible outcomes. And some shit is just straight up unpredictable. However, at this past job I witnessed some seriously blatant head in the sand, grossly shortsighted behaviors which left me simply stunned and left everyone scrambling when the shit inevitably hit the fan.

And so I am somewhat happy to be done there. I am very unhappy to be unemployed though. Another day on the internet, surfing the job boards and updating my online resumes and candidate info sites (think PeopleSoft but worse). I just rewrote a cover letter, my entire resume, and revised my work experiences on this god awful hosting site called Taleo. Holy crap that thing was a pain in the ass....speaking of the link between poor business culture poor business practice, it seems Taleo sucks in ways beyond my limited job seeking perspective.

While I am off and in need of projects, I've decided to look for cat food alternatives for my cat Max. Max has IBD, probably some food intolerances. For some time now, he's been on a limited ingredient/novel protein diet. We had him on Hill's prescription diet D/D, rabbit, venison, and duck. He tends to eat only one kind, then after some time, he refuses it and we need to switch to a different flavor. A few years ago now, he stopped eating the D/D altogether so at the advice of our vet, we switched him to Royal Canin's limited ingredient/novel protein diet. He ate that happily for a while and with less good (but still not horrible) digestive results than with the Hill's. Then he started getting bad in terms of digestive symptoms (as a friend calls it, "Pandora's Cat Box") and also constitutional symptoms. We took him to the vet and he had some funny blood chemistry values. So back to Hill's, which he ate as if it were new and which agreed with him better. But now he's refusing the Hill's again to the point where he's losing weight. He's hungry, he wants food, but not that food apparently.

We have been punting with just feeding him meats he can eat "au jus", mostly consisting of shredded pork with water and fish oil since he has a demonstrable intolerance to chicken, turkey, and beef. But this is not going to give him the nutrients he needs, moveover, he's still losing weight. I took some time on Monday and Tuesday to research cat food that meets the following criteria:
Has no chicken, turkey, or beef
Has no glutten/wheat or corn products

The first we tried was California Natural salmon and sweet potato. This was a bit of a risk since I suspect the cat doesn't do well with salmon. However, it wasn't clear if his past salmon problems were a result of salmon alone, salmon in combination, or were simply due to some other product in the salmon based food he'd eaten in the past. Yeah, well, turns out that salmon is apparently a definite part of the problem. So no more of that. This morning we are on to Nature's Variety Instinct for cats. The one I've selected is Lamb. It's in no way a limited ingredient formula, nor does it have a single source of protein, however it has none of the items I know or strongly suspect Max to have an intolerance to.

So far, he's had most of a can and not pooped it all out. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one.